Monday, July 31, 2017

I stuck with it

OK so I'm stubborn. Rather than give up and pitch it, I carefully fixed it, undoing the ring carefully around the hidden core threads. I didn't want to deal with hiding a bzillion threads in a single ring. So, I put aside one of the shuttles I had cut off and took the other one and unwound enough thread to tat a couple of rings and attached the end to a SPARE shuttle, so my thread was CTM again. (I could have finger tatted with the end, but I was already dealing with lots of loose ends and it was easier to keep track of this end when it was attached to a spare shuttle.) Then I used the shuttle to start the last split ring again carefully hiding one of the old ends (and the alternate colour) in the first half of the ring. I used the spare shuttle to tat the second half of the split ring while hiding the alternate colour and the other old thread end. That got rid of the two old cut ends.

Then I switched to the alternate colour to tat the next split ring, hiding the first colour in it's core. I proceeded to tat with the second colour until I was finished with it. When I switched back to the first colour, (the one that broke) I was running out of thread on the spare shuttle. That's OK, it had served it's purpose, I was now far enough from where I had joined in the new thread and hidden the 2 old ends that I could hide the ends of the new thread. I picked up the second shuttle and started tatting with it, hiding the end of the thread from the spare shuttle. On the next ring I hid the starting end of thread from the second shuttle. By the next ring all thread ends were hidden and I was back to tatting with 4 shuttles.

Whew! All that, just so that I could see what this design looked like done in 2 colours. Actually I guess that's 3 colours. (So I can't count. What else is new? It's not as bad as telling hubby to go left while pointing to the exit off the highway to the right- He only had to back up on the highway 100 yards.)

OK, back to serious stuff. I started this design thinking about doing bookmarks with 4 ring motifs. Then I thought about a 5 ring motif, joined alternating 3 rings on the side with 2 rings on the side, flip flopping them so that it resembled a flower and resulted in a straight line. When it was done, the 5 ring flower just merged together into a solid band of rings and the flower effect was lost. See the bookmark done in red and green. The individual flowers just disappear. Which is why I wanted to see the effect with 2 different colours used for the flowers.

See this one done with the 5 ring motifs alternating in red and pink. The flower shapes are evident and the green on the outside suggests leaves.

I don't like the 4 green rings on the ends. I'm not sure what I did on the original, I might have just used plain chains going around the end of the bookmark. Whatever it was, it didn't result in the lop sided effect the 4 rings give, but maybe I'm just being critical. It doesn't matter now anyway because I've done the design again and this time I have pictures of it.

Now that that's out of the way I can go back to embroidering that second picture I was working on. Or maybe not, as I've just thought of something else I could tat....